Tuka and the Varkaris

The Varkari movement centred on the god Vithoba, located at Pandharpur on the banks of a
tributary at the Krishna River in southern Maharashtra, a god with Kannade ‘hero-deity’
origins, identified with Vishnu/Krishna in the Brahmanic tradition. The story is that God
(Krishna/Vishnu) came from Dwarka to the semi-mythical original devotee, Pundalik; Pundalik
however was so engrossed in service to his parents that he told the God to wait, throwing a
brick for him to stand on. The brick has been ever since a unique symbol of Vitthala or Vithoba.

If we look at the history of the Varkari movement, Dnyaneshwar is normally considered its
founder. In the popular tradition today, his name is coupled with Tuka’s—‘Gyanba-Tuka’.
Dnyaneshwar wrote Dnyaneshwari, a Marathi philosophical commentary on the Bhagavad Gita.
Dnyaneshwari parayans (readings) are a normal practice in Maharashtrian villages today,
sponsored usually by the village elites, while the more genuinely popular abhangs of Tuka and
others are rarely heard.

Thus there is a problem of recovering the ‘authentic’ song poems (bhajans, abhangs, dohas,
shabda, etc.) of all of the sants. In the case of Kabir, Ravidas, Cokhamela, and Mirabai, none
were written down until long after their deaths. Tuka was able to write in spite of the tradition
against it, and at great cost kept his own notebooks. But while over 4700 songs exist in the
current official government collection, there has never been even an attempt to do a critical
edition.

The selection of Tuka’s abhangs are one of the most authentic abhangs owing to several reasons.
The first reason is its being anti-caste and anti-Brahmanic, since this went against the interests of
the record keepers. Second, is the feel and style of Tuka’s abhangs. His language was sharp. His
metaphors were strong and compelling. Third, all his work indicates that he did not have a low
self-image; when he described his caste status as low he was simply critiquing the social view of
him. Finally, it was Tuka’s non-critical and unquestioning attitude towards the Vedas in
contrast to Kabir, who very sarcastically and frequently did so. Tuka claims that he knows what
the Vedas really say and that he is expounding them. This makes Tuka vedapramanya (accepting
the primacy of the Vedas).

The Foundations of ‘Human Rights’ in India: Against Caste and Untouchability

What the ‘secularists’ of today fail to see is that this tradition did not begin only in the colonial
period, and it is not to be identified with an unstructured Hinduism that allows Vedic sanctity,
Brahmanical authority, and varna hierarchy to sneak in by the back door. Rather, the tradition
of equality and rights had a foundation in India in Buddhism (and other shramanic traditions)
in the ancient period—and in the ‘early modern’ period, the bhakti sants began to give it a new
direction by linking it to hopes that the world could be transformed. In other words, they
fought the political priesthood with demands for a new world, to be realized not in the next life
through karma or in escape from samsara to union with the absolute, but in the empirical world,
here and now—if only in the future.

With this as a background, let us look at some characteristics of caste and untouchablity in the
song-poems of the Bhakti radical sants, especially Tuka:

Terminology: The Identification of Jatis and the reality of the Caste System

God ignores our hierarchies

Showing loyalty only to devotion.
He eats the food of the slave’s son Vidur,
Gives protection to Prahlad in the demon’s house.
He helps Rohidas in dy[e]ing leather,
And Kabir in weaving on the loom.
He helps Sajanak to sell his meat,
And weeds the field with Savata,
Helps goldsmith Narhari to heat the metal,
With Cokhamela hauls dead cattle.
With Nama’s Jani he gathers dung,
And waters the tree in the house of Dharma.
He feels no difficulty in dining with Nama,
He holds the reins of Arjun’s horse,
and eats the loving breakfast of Sudam.
He tends the cow in the house of the Gawlis,
Became a guard at Bali’s door.
He drinks the poison meant for Mirabai
And becomes the Mahar messenger for Damaji,
Carries the clay for Gora on the wheel
And fills the bill of exchange of the Mahanta.
For Pundalik he is standing still in wait—says Tuka, his accomplishments are great. (#2820)

Blessed the lineage, holy the land,

Where the servants of Hari are born ….
Karmadharma’s become Narayan,
It’s he who has purified the worlds. [refrain]
Who is purified by pride
Of varna, tell me if you know!
Untouchables are saved by hymns to Hari,
Legendary stories become their bards.
Tuladhar Vaishya, the potmaker Gora,
The leatherworker Rohidas,
The momin Kabir, Latif the Muslim,
The barber Sena are Vishnudas.
Kanhopatra, Khodu, cotton-carder dadu,
Sing hymns to Hari without discord.
Banka, Chokhamela, by caste Mahar,
Have united with the Lord.
What is the worth of Nama’s Jani,
When Pandhari’s lord eats in her company?
What greatness did he have, do tell!
Vishnu’s servants have no caste,
The Veda’s science so decrees.
Tuka says, which of your books
Have saved the fallen—I know of none. (#4299)

These two abhangs (song-poems) show a notable feature of Tuka’s poetry, that is, a very
specific use of jati names along with the general Varna terminology. Thus, in the above abhangs
we have not only the theme of a wide identification of the Varkari movement—so that not only
the known Maharastrians, but also Puranic figures and Kabir, Rohidas, and Mirabai become
part of the movement—but there is also specific jati identification. Savata is a Mali, Narhari a
sonar, Gora a Kumbhar, Ravidas a Chambhar, Kabir a Momin, Sena a Nhavi, Dadu a Pinjari (a
Muslim ‘cotton carder’), and Cokhamela a Mahar. The terminology is Maharastrian, as can be
seen in the case of Kabir (who would be a ‘Julaha’ in north Indian terms) and Ravidas (who
would be ‘Chamar’). It seems here that we are not simply talking about occupation, but about
jati itself. Similarly, just as Eknath has a whole series of voices of village characters, so did Tuka,
with varying dialects and varying names.

All social phenomena are constructed not by one set of actors only, but by all the members of
society. And they are constructed within a context with an outcome that is not determined by
the intentions of any individual or set of individuals. Weber called this the ‘unanticipated
consequence’ of social action; Adam Smith spoke of an ‘invisible hand’; and as Marx put it,
‘Men make history but they make it under conditions not of their choosing’. This means that in
social analysis it is not enough to take into account the meaning of the action to the actor; the
‘material’ social structure must be analysed.

As for the unique role attributed to the colonial period, processes initiated then certainly
affected the structure and practices of the caste system, but the hegemonic actors in the process
were the Indian elite as much as the British. And the system itself existed long prior to the
colonial period, however loose and flexible it may have been. Just as ‘race’ in the United States
is a social reality, a socially constructed category with real consequences, one with amorphous;
people may be able to move between jatis by ‘passing’ in various forms. But the system remains,
and it is a system that exploits and humiliates those considered low. The very antagonism with
which the radical bhaktas condemned jati and varna, and often the Vedas and punditry behind
them (and even in the case of Tuka, advaita itself), indicates the expoitativeness of the system.
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